User:Ssstephen/Reading/Liber de Compositione Alchimiae

I am reading this via Justin Sledge's video essay about it.

It is a translation of an Arabic text by Khalid ibn Yazid (maybe, if he was real) and has some really interesting interpretations of the original text (ie lying). For example it traces a genealogy of alchemy that mostly ignores the Arabic tradition and makes it sound like it was passed from pagan scholars to christian ones.

Corrupt or untranslated Arabic words later gain a mystical power, for example "Azoth", which is a corruption of azoc, being originally derived from the Arabic al-zā'būq "the mercury". In alchemy this became both a sort of universal medication and universal solvent.

Europeans have really no idea what [these words] mean, and they are going to back fill that meaning with all kinds of mystical, supernatural and sometimes even magical storytelling.